SCS External tool does not find B.C

I've loaded up Beyond Compare, but seemingly SQL Assistant does not find it (states (not found)).
The help documentation leads me to believe it's looking for it in C:\program files, rather than C:\program files (x86) on a 64-bit computer.

Also setting the tool to a custom config:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Beyond Compare 3\BComp.exe" %1 %2

opens Beyond Compare, but tries to compare %1 to %2, not the actual files.

It seems the documentation is out of date?

This worked:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Beyond Compare 3\BComp.exe" %left %right

I only found those variables thanks to a tool tip popup.

Thank you. You are correct. The documentation for that option appears outdated.

	SysOp wrote:
	Thank you. You are correct. The documentation for that option appears outdated.

Alright, good to know.

I asked for similar advice here but I haven't tried that since then. Now I made another attempt and strange things happened.

I'm interested primarily in comparing the contents of two editor windows rather than comparing versions and though there's a built-in compare in SA I'd like to use BC because I'm more familiar with it and it has some feature that the built-in lacks.

While in the post mentioned above I was complaining about the default BC setting available in Source Control > External Compare Tool not working (the "not found" issue) and selecting BC as Other... working, now I've got them straight the opposite. Choosing it as Other... does not do anything on either Ctrl + Shift + C or by selecting it from the menu and simply selecting it from the drop down menu works (in spite of the OS being 64bit and BC installed in Program Files (x86)). I found out that it required enclosing the full path in double quotes for Other... to work but it only opens the New Session dialog in BC. Adding %1 %2 to the setting opens BC with two empty panes, and adding %left %right opens BC with a temporary file open in left (the contents of the active editor window, not necessarily the left one) and nothing in the right.

Using the dropdown instance makes BC open with the contents of the active editor in the left (with the word Editor in the file name editbox that's revealed as a temp file when clicked upon) and nothing in the right pane of BC and as soon as I add something to External Compare Tool field (either %1 %2 or %left %right) both the hotkey and the menu item cease to function.

Is it only a side-effect that the setting in Source Control option made BC open on Ctrl + Shift + C? Code comparison is not strictly a source control feature after all (it's certainly not in case when someone just wants to see differences between two code fragments).

The "External Compare Tool" option was initially introduced for the source control interface to enable use of specialized feature-rich code comparison and code merge tools like Beyond Compare. For historically reasons that option sits in the Source Control group of settings, but it's scope goes beyond that. If an external tool is selected for code comparison, it is invoked in all places. For example, Code View pan vs. Editor (that little icon in the top-right corner of the Code View pan), or Code View pan vs. file.

Ctrl+Shift+C is not the exactly same thing. It is not known at that time what you are going to compare other than the text in the editor. It is assumed that you will save the other text to a file and then use the invoked BC instance to open the right side.

The correct command line for the external code compare tool should use %left and %right placeholders and they should be enclosed in double quotes to avoid issues with spaces in file names. For example, on my system I've got an older version of BS and my command line is
"C:\Program Files\Beyond Compare 2\bc2.exe" "%left" "%right"

That makes sense, thanks for the explanation. I'll have to implement a solution of my own, one that's similar to built-in compare, the one that steals text context from editor.